Metonymy and Conceptual Blending

3.Metonymic Shifts

In their book Mental Leaps, Holyoak and Thagard (1995) claim that the difference between metaphor and analogy is that metaphors, especially literary ones, are subject to "loose" and "shifting" mappings which are the side-effects of metonymy. Treating it as a somewhat suspect technique, Holyoak & Thagard argue that metonymy's intrusion into metaphoric language places metaphor outside the explanatory bounds of a theory of analogy. An unbridled force at large in the literary universe, metonymy leads at best to analogical inconsistency, at worst to incoherence. In support of their position, Holyoak & Thagard point to the following excerpt from the writings of Ernest Hemingway:
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless (Cited in Holyoak & Thagard, 1995:224).
Analyzing the passage, Holyoak & Thagard point to the fact that the writer's talent is initially mapped to the pattern of dust on the butterfly's wings, and later to the wings themselves. Further, they point out that there is no causal relationship between patterns on a butterfly's wings and its ability to fly, and no reason why consciousness of wings should affect the butterfly's ability to fly. In blending theory, analogical mismatches like this are frequently used to motivate the need for a blended space analysis. Indeed, in their discussion of this example, Holyoak & Thagard resort to the use of slashes to represent the conceptual fusion of ideas: "A butterfly's pattern is not causally related to its flight, so if talent is mapped to the pattern, then there is no reason why consciousness of the talent/pattern should interfere with the ability to exercise it," (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995: 224).
In fact, one might also note that real butterflies cannot properly be said to be conscious of anything, let alone be the sort of intentional creature whose consciousness of a particular ability impairs the exercise of that ability. There is indeed an analogical mismatch between the domain of the man's consciousness of his own talent and the realistic domain of butterflies. But where Holyoak & Thagard suggest the passage involves metaphor "extended by the associative aura created by metonymy," we suggest it prompts a blended conceptualization of the writer and the butterfly that exploits both metaphoric and metonymic mappings. The first sentence, an explicit comparison between the man's talent and the dust on a butterfly's wings serves to set up the two input spaces for the ensuing blend: a "human" space with the man and his talent, and a "butterfly" space with the butterfly and the dust. The blend between the two spaces is prompted by the second sentence, "At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred."
Although the sentence begins by referring to elements in the human space, the focus gradually shifts to a blended space that concerns a hybrid man/butterfly, exploiting partial structure from each of the input spaces. For example, the initial use of the pronoun "he" ("he understood") refers to the man, while the second refers to the hybrid man/butterfly ("he did not know when it was brushed or marred.") The transition to reference to the blended space is mediated by an ambiguity in the elided phrase "the butterfly did" in "he understood it no more than the butterfly did." This phrase could be interpreted as a comparison between the man's understanding of his artistic talent and the butterfly's understanding of the dust pattern on its wings; or between the man's understanding of his talent and the butterfly's understanding of the man's talent; or even between the man's understanding of his talent and the butterfly's understanding of its own talent. Similarly, the first use of the pronoun "it" (in "he understood it") refers to the man's talent, while the second (in "he did not know when it was brushed or marred,") can be understood as referring alternately to the pattern of dust on the butterfly's wing, the man's talent, or an element in the blended space with the attributes of both the dust pattern and the man's talent.
The multiple interpretations for this sentence can be captured in the conceptual integration network in figure 2. In the human space, the man does not understand his artistic talent; in the butterfly space, the butterfly does not understand the pattern of dust on its wings. In the blended space, the "he" is a butterfly with the intentional powers of a human, and the dust pattern is a feature of its wings that it could potentially understand, but doesn't. The initial blend conforms well to the first three optimality principles: integration, topology, and web. A cognitive model of a butterfly who is not conscious of the dust pattern on his wings is an integrated representation that is easy to manipulate. It conforms to the topology principle because the relational structure in the blended space corresponds to relational structure in the inputs. Moreover, it conforms to the web principle because the mappings between elements in the blended space and their counterparts in the input spaces are consistent.

However, the third sentence ("Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and he could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless,") employs slightly different mappings between the elements in the blend and the inputs, thereby violating the web principle. As Holyoak & Thagard point out, the man's talent is initially mapped to the dust pattern on the butterfly's wings, but shifts to the wings themselves. This violation of the web principle is offset by metonymic tightening, the pressure to "compress" metonymically related elements in a blended space. In this case, the metonymic relationship of adjacency between the butterfly's wings and the dust pattern licenses a mapping between the man's talent – formerly mapped to the dust on the wings – and the wings themselves.
The need for a blended analysis of the third sentence is readily apparent as it makes little sense to talk about a man "conscious of his damaged wings", nor of a butterfly who, having lost the love of flight, "could only remember when it had been effortless." Though the mapping of the man's talent has shifted from the dust pattern on the wings to the butterfly's wings themselves, the mapping between the man and the butterfly remains intact, and the blended space again features a hybrid creature with the body of a butterfly and the cognitive and emotional capacity of the man represented in the human space. With the new mapping scheme
established, the blend in the third sentence satisfies both the web and the topology constraints as the butterfly's wings continue to map to the man's talent in a systematic way. For example, damaged wings correspond to fading talent, inability to fly (an action that requires intact wings) corresponds to the man's inability to employ his talent (viz. writer's block), and the love of flight (enjoyment in the ability to use the wings for their intended purpose) corresponds to the man's love of writing (enjoyment in the ability to exercise his talent).
Though Hemingway's passage does indeed employ a series of analogical mappings between conceptual structure taken variously from the domains of butterflies and humans, it does not set up an analogy between the two domains. That is, Hemingway does not exploit the reader's knowledge of butterflies to explicate notions pertaining to artistic talent. Rather, he exploits the reader's ability to integrate conceptual structure from disparate domains that enable her to understand and empathize with the aging artist. While the reader may not understand the artist's joy in practicing his art, she can imagine the thrill of flight. Moreover, having imagined the thrill of flight, the reader is in a better position to empathize with the loss of this ability, and consequently its counterpart in the human space, the man's ability to write. If anything, the analogy is from the blended conceptualization of the human butterfly to the experience of the aging artist.
Metonymy is used here to shift the mapping schema in a way that violates the topology constraint, but optimizes integration. The metonymically licensed slip is rhetorically motivated because the first blend serves the original motivation of explicating the utter mindlessness of the artist's talent, and the second best serves the rhetorical motivation of explicating the emotive significance of a whole series of events as the artist's ability changes over the course of time. This includes the euphoric nature of the artist exercising his talent, the loss of this ability and the associated regret, as well as the causal sequence of events that produced the loss of talent. In subsequent examples we explore other ways that metonymy licenses different sorts of blends, and the way in which metonymic mappings affect the interplay of the optimality principles. In particular, metonymic language frequently involves conflict of the integration principle with the web and topology principles.